Staten Island, New York, is a sombre place as islands go, but it has managed to cast some spells. Once upon a time there was a Prospero there in the shape of Marius Bewley, literary critic, Anglophile and Adlai Steven-sonian, who held court among his cats in a Gothic villa above the ferry terminal, where crowds would leave for work in their instalments, churning past the Statue of Liberty towards the Wall Street skyline. Many of these people were descendants of the weary masses summoned by Liberty from their hard times in Europe; and many of them have since been diverted across the Verrazano Bridge, by car, to Brooklyn. Up the road from Marius's villa, moreover, in the years that followed, there came to live, with his Dobermans, a fairy godfather - of the kind that used to be seen as the immigrant's friend - and in Marius's time, too, there were indications, sounds and airs, that the black magic of the Mafia was known to the island.

LRB 10 October 1991 | PDF Download